14 July 2016

Why Do Progressives Get Religion?

We recently took up John
McWhorter's assertion that Anti-Racism / Multiculturalism has become a religion. We found many ways in which the argument holds up--clear evidence of dogma, holy
writ, acts of piety, fighting heresy, etc.

But a deeper question is,
Why? What is it about the progressive mind that makes it so vulnerable
to this type of extreme out-group empathy?

The proposed reasons are
many. Today we offer up a selection that may help us better grasp what we're
dealing with when faced with a fervent Multiculturalist who seems immune to all fact and logic.

Before we talk about
progressives in particular, let's look at us WEIRDs in general (Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich, Democratic). (Or WEIRDOs, if one adds 'Outbred.')

A hundred years ago,
prominent leftists like J.A. Hobson could speak of the 'backward races'or
the 'non-adult races'without anyone batting an
eye. Today not even the rightest of the right-wing could utter such a
phrase without being pilloried. As this Overton window shift testifies, today's Anglo-Germanics have
become far more open to outsiders than pretty much anyone in human history.

Let's go back as far as we
can. It cannot be stressed enough that out-group enmity is the historical
norm in all populations. We come from small hunter-gatherer groups;
our oldest and deepest instincts are 'trust closest family; be ready to kill
all others.' (Rushton, Diamond) As E.O. Wilson says, 'the selection pressures of
hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99% of human genetic
evolution.' This is our common genetic heritage.

In cold climates males were selected for provisioning, rather than for mating
success. ... Negroids
(blacks) evolved in warm climates, while Caucasians (whites) and Mongoloids
(Asians) evolved in colder climates. Mating is assisted by a strong sex drive, aggression,
dominance, sociability, extraversion,impulsiveness, sensation
seeking, and high testosterone. Provisioning is assisted by anxiety, altruism, empathy,
behavioral restraint, gratification delay, and a long life span.

Many researchers believe
the very first large farming settlements (of which there is evidence going back
to at least 7500 B.C.) were probably violent places, and that the first social
controls mandating out-group cooperation were born here. Cochran and Harpending:

Farming
led to elites, and there was no avoiding their power. … The old-style,
independent-minded personalities that had worked well among hunter-gatherers
were obsolete. ... Since the elites were in a very real sense raising peasants,
just as peasants raised cows, there must have been a tendency for them to
cull individuals who were more aggressive than average, which over time
would have changed the frequency of those alleles that induced such
aggressiveness. (1)

Male combativeness is especially strong in highland pastoral societies
beyond the reach of State control. ... If highland pastoral societies represent one end of this
behavioral continuum, the other end seems to be the low-lying farming societies
of east and southeast Asia, where State formation, rice farming, and sedentary
life favored collectivism over individualism anda general
pacification of social relations.

David H. Fisher in Albion's Seedtalks about settlers from the
violent, arid border regions of Scotland and England in our southern back
country:

The
people of this region were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of
“foreigners.” One student of the Appalachian dialect found that “the word
foreigner itself is used here [in Appalachia] in its Elizabethan sense of
someone who is the same nationality as the speaker, but not from the
speaker’s immediate area.” All the world seemed foreign to the backsettlers
except their neighbors and kin. … (2)

Nisbett and Cohen, in Culture of Honor, also argue that in the southern U.S. the
'honor culture' and suspicion of outsiders still persists today, as seen in the
customs, behaviors, and crime rates of the U.S. South's Euro population. (3)

Steve Sailer, in his 2003 'The Cousin Marriage Conundrum,' was the first journalist to
succintly point out the problems of societal trust where cousin-marriage is
prominent:

By
fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding
makes the development of civil society more difficult. ... Extended
families that are incredibly tightly bound are really the enemy of civil
society because the alliances of family override any consideration of fairness
to people in the larger society.

No one has done more to try
to pick apart the biological 'why' of high- and low-trust peoples than HBD Chick.
Her online research on the history of cousin-marriage is unmatched. (Consult
her blog for a wealth of data on consanguinity around the world; see also JayMan's detailed sum-up.) As she has shown,
while Muslims favored inbreeding, the early Church pushed outbreeding.

According to her theory, the
most familistic, out-group-wary peoples on the planet today are those with the
longest histories of inbreeding, and the high-commonweal folks are those who
stamped out cousin marriage first--notably NW Europeans. (See also JayMan.)

In
the bipartite manor system, peasants or serfs ... lived on and managed their
own farms (let out to them by the manor owner) and also worked on the manor or
paid rent to the manor. Extended families very much did not fit into
the manor system as it operated in Western Europe. So manorialism — at least
western manorialism — “pushed” for the nuclear family.

This system seems to have
fostered individualism, commonweal-orientation, civicness, less violence--and,
who knows, the seeds of our extreme out-group empathy?

b) Printing press

Cultural pressures can come
from new technologies as well. For Steven Pinker, the 'better angels of our nature' have pushed us to be more out-group
friendly, first and foremost due to mass literacy:

The
growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an
exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. …
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts
are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. ... you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily
sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.

… Around the same time that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the United
States, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby
(1839) opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of children in British
workhouses and orphanages, and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the
Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) and Herman Melville’s White
Jacket helped end the flogging of sailors. (5)

I believe that the people [John] Locke and others addressed were already
equipped with a wide capacity for empathy. When they heard of other people around the
world and the arguments on how they should be treated, they responded
accordingly…

Staffan's major beef with
Pinker:

…Width
of empathy is only large in Northwest Europeans and their descendants. People
sometimes referred to as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich,
Democratic). … The rest of the world is not very impressed by
Enlightenment ideals and it never was.

Another cultural pressure
is that of dense urban vs. loose rural living. As noted above, Cochran and Harpending surmised that the first large
settlements of 10,000 years ago likely tamed our fiercest out-group
murderousness.

The 'city mouse / country
mouse spat' is in any case as old as recorded history. From Aesop's fable , after Country Mouse feasts in town
with his City Cousin and is attacked by cats and dogs:

The Country Mouse said,
“No, no; I shall be off as fast as I can. I would rather have a crust with
peace and quietness, than all your fine things in the midst of such alarms
and frights as these.”

For millennia the peasant
has been mocked as a hidebound simpleton, the city-dweller as an effete dandy.
(Not without reason.) But the Romes and Baghdads were the exception-- for most
of the last 10,000 years, we've been 95% rural-dwellers. Only today,
post-Industrial Revolution, has that ratio nearly reversed itself.

Voting patterns show that city folk
tend to vote left and country folk right (click to enlarge):

But this can be a
chicken-and-egg question: Are conservatives drawn to the countryside and
liberals to the city because that's where they perceive others like
themselves to be? Does growing up in a city--which more of us do now then
at any time in history-- push people to more out-group tolerance? Since we were
95% rural folk for most of history, but are today less than 20%...

...could
this new way of livingbe
pushing us to a 'bigger circle of empathy'?

d) Wealth

GDP per capita, Eurozone (pre-crisis)

Can greater wealth itself
become a cultural pressure? Ronald Inglehart of the World Values Survey thinks so. He claims that in general, as a
people grows wealthier, it becomes more out-group tolerant:

[Economic]
development is linked with a syndrome of predictable changes away from absolute
social norms, toward increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and
postmodern values. But culture is path dependent. The fact that a society
was historically Protestant or Orthodox or Islamic or Confucian gives rise to
cultural zones with highly distinctive value systems that persist when we
control for the effects of economic development. (6)

Inglehart was the first to
place the world's countries on a scatter plot according to two value axes:
"traditional secular" and
"survival self-expression":-->-->

TRADITIONAL / SECULAR

…
Societies at the traditional pole emphasize religion, absolute
standards, and traditional family values; favor large families; reject divorce;
and take a pro-life stance on abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. They emphasize
social conformity rather than individualistic achievement, favor consensus
rather than open political conflict, support deference to authority, and have
high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook. (Societies with
secular-rational values have the opposite preferences on all these topics.)

Societies that emphasize survival values show relatively low levels of
subjective well-being, report relatively poor health, are low on
interpersonal trust, are relatively intolerant toward outgroups, are low on
support for gender equality, emphasize materialist values, have relatively high
levels of faith in science and technology, are relatively low on environmental
activism, and are relatively favorable to authoritarian government. (Societies
that emphasize self-expression values tend to have the opposite preferences on
all these topics.) (6)

Extensive
evidence indicates that these values tap an intergenerational shift from
emphasis on economic and physical security toward increasing emphasis on
self-expression, subjective well-being, and quality of life ... it seems to emerge among birth cohorts that have grown up under
conditions in which survival is taken for granted.

These generations 'free
from all want' are quite new, and are mostly found in the West.
Could this help explain our current crop of hothouse flowers, so blithely trusting of outsiders?

3) Group Pressures

In
addition to our natural environment and cultural pressures, many feel
that certain groups have had an outsized effect on our level of empathy to
outsiders.

In the West, the industrial
revolution led to countless changes, including that of the rise of women as a
'lobby.' Some warned of trouble ahead. Author Madeleine V. Dahlgren, in 1871:

The
special advantage as a safe advisor to man that woman holds at present arises
entirely from the neutral ground she occupies in the political world. Were
she herself to enter the arena her ardent impulses would lead her to the most
dangerous experiments. The fact is, women reason less and feel more deeply
than men.

...
Involved in one common ruin from our present proud preeminence, [after women's
suffrage] we shall become a laughing-stock and a by-word to the nations
of the world.

The
general acceptance of the feminist definition
of private and public life in the
Western democracies as the new orthodoxy, in
conjunction with the prescriptive thrust of
feminism, result in the feminization of
politics, the feminization of the economy
and the feminization of the culture.
Taken together we may thus speak of the
ascent of a new sentimental imperialism.

(The 'old sentimental imperialism' is well laid out in Chapter 3 of Hobson's 1905 Imperialism, A Study.Our work on the subject can be found here.)

This
is carried, in the main, by the
feminist vision that seeks to radically
transform world culture. This
general imperialistic thrust of feminism ... will decisively shape the direction of
future public debates.

In
the words of Gloria Steinem "…we can
humanize the machinery of politics to
make a better society." Said Betty
Walker Smith, "Let's humanize America and
save her." ... These pioneer voices of 1970s
feminist activists have become familiar bromides
today: instead of women having to become
more like men, men will have to become
more like women.

Men are supposed to be the
hard-headed ones, women the soft-headed. Has this 'feminization of politics'
led to what Steve Sailer calls 'Invade the World, Invite the World' (democratize the poor dears by
force and if that doesn't work, invite them all here) and 'the Zeroeth Amendment' (everyone on Planet Earth has the
right to immigrate to the U.S.)?
It is impossible to say with surety that women's entry into politics has led to
more out-group friendly policies, but the evidence is intriguing.

We have seen that the early
Church's anti-inbreeding push changed family formation and thus
values in Europe. Could the later influence of the Protestant and Catholic
churches have affected our out-group feelings as well? Or is that the cart
before the horse-- are the out-group tolerant more likely to become Protestant
in the first place? Inglehart:

…
Asthe figure demonstrates, virtually all
historically Protestant societies rank higher on interpersonal trust than
virtually all historically Catholic societies. This holds true even when we
control for levels of economic development: interpersonal trust is
significantly correlated with the society's level of GNP/capita, but even rich
Catholic societies rank lower than equally prosperous historically Protestant societies.
(6)

Even
relatively tolerant Anglo-American peoples until recently did not behave with
deference toward those recently arrived and culturally alien. ... The
desperate efforts now being made by Western countries, particularly by
Protestant ones, to raise themselves morally by receiving populations entirely
“distinct” from themselves is not a continuation of older attitudes
toward immigration.

…
Without the guilt ethic preached by contemporary Christianity, it
would be hard to imagine the sweeping affirmations now taking place about the
moral superiority of alien cultures. (10)

c) Communists

What about the influence
that communist government--or lack of one--can have? Inglehart:

A
heritage of communist rule also seems to have an impact on this variable,
with virtually all ex-communist societies ranking relatively low. Accordingly,
historically Protestant societies that experienced communist rule, such as East
Germany and Latvia, show relatively low levels of interpersonal trust. (6)

He is referring to the
graph just above, but here is a more recent WVS meausure of societal trust vs.
corruption around the world--note Eastern European countries in light blue:

Many complain that academia
has taken a big role in pushing for ever more out-group tolerance:

During the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly
20-percent jump in the number of professors who identify as liberal. That increase has created a
lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now
outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.

So
indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is
discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the
natural human good ... Instinct and intellect must be
suppressed by education.

He warned about being too
pliant with out-groups:

That
dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its
literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language,
and its Protestant religions. Much of the intellectual machinery of
twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed
for the purposes of making an assault on that majority ... in favor of a
nation of minorities and groups each following its own beliefs and
inclinations.

...
None of this concerns those who promote the new curriculum. The point is to
propagandize acceptance of different ways … Practically all that young
Americans have today is aninsubstantial awareness that there are many cultures,accompanied
by a saccharine moral drawn from that awareness:We should all get along.Why fight?
(7)

Bloom himself probably
couldn't have imagined how far this snowball would roll:

Though today the notion has
become dangerously unfashionable, one cannot deny the outsized influence the
Jewish diaspora has had on multiculturalism in the West. Evolutionary
psychologist Kevin MacDonald:

Studies in Prejudice and, especially, The Authoritarian
Personality attempt to show that gentile group affiliations, and
particularly membership in Christian religious sects, gentile nationalism,
and close family relationships, are an indication of psychiatric disorder.
At a deep level the work of the Frankfurt School is addressed to altering
Western societies in an attempt to make them resistant to anti-Semitism by
pathologizing gentile group affiliations.

A
consistent theme of The
Authoritarian Personality is the idea that gentile participation in
cohesive groups with high levels of social conformity is pathological,
whereas similar behavior of Jews … is ignored.

This list of environmental
as well as cultural pressures has, we hope, helped to give some clues as to how
the Overton window could have shifted so far left on questions involving
out-groups (segregation, immigration, interracial marriage / adoption, etc). Put simply, all ethnic NW Euros today--right and left--have a historically unprecedented level of out-group empathy.

So now we come to the real object of our study: the dyed-in-the-wool leftist. As we have seen, he has been gripped devilishly hard by the The Anti-racist / Multiculturalist fervor.

Hibbing et al. found evidence that self-identified liberals and conservatives differ on a great deal more than just economic policy.

a) Preferences

Via
a variety of studies and online polls, they posit that there are real lefty and
righty differences in (9):

food preference (greens vs. meat)

humor preference (resolution of incongruity or not)

favorite fiction (ambiguity vs. clear resolution)

favorite art (abstract vs. representational)

Jackson Pollack, Nicolas Poussin

personal space orderliness (less vs. more)

car preference (Volvo vs. Porsche for rich, Japanese
vs. American for poor)

Rich lefty, rich righty

choice of investment stocks (high-tech vs. heavy
industry)

b) Values

Via values studies, Hibbing
et al. find even more variation in the personality of righties and lefties.

We here at TWCS are peering into the liberal mind. But as Hibbing et al. point out, since the age of the great totalitarianisms, most researchers have been trying to pin down the supposed right-wing 'authoritarian personality.' Theodor Adorno (cited above) wrote
the best-known work on this elusive 'authoritarian' who walks among us.

Researchers
have tried to tease out this creature via scales: Adorno's colleague
Frenkel-Brunswick and her 'F-scale' (for 'fascism'), Glenn Wilson and
his 'C-scale' ('conservatism'), Robert Altemeyer and
his 'RWA' ('right-wing authoritarian' index).
Hibbings et al. bemoan the fact that the left-wing authoritarian
personality has been so little studied, with Hans Eysenck the only one venturing down this
path. (9)

Our
findings suggest that liberals are more influenced by social cues—even when
told to explicitly ignore those cues.Conservatives seem to be more willing or able to ignore cues and follow
the rules that govern the situation. … We found that
conservatives were more likely to believe it is “better” for people not to be
influenced by where others are looking, while liberals were just the opposite. (9)

Not
to go too into detail (see study), but a lab game called 'BeanFest' showed
big variance in lefty and righty thought. Beans with different spots pop up,
some add points, some subtract points. You have to suss out which are which,
and remember for when they flash on the screen again.

It
did not take long for the researchers to note that people varied widely in the
way they played BeanFest.Some threw caution to the wind and accepted beans with abandon. This meant they gained and lost a lot of points but also
collected substantial amounts of information about the value of the various
beans.Others were much more wary, accepting just a few beans at first and then
only accepting subsequent beans that matched the few types known to be good.

(One guess as to which political orientation was
which.) After the game, the players were given a test to see what they'd
retained:

Liberals
were just a bit better at remembering which beans were bad than they were at
remembering which beans were good; however, there was no such approximate
balance for conservatives—they knew a bad bean when they saw one. Actually,
they knew a bad bean even when they didn’t see one. Conservatives were
way better than liberals at correctly identifying bad beans, but they were also
more likely to miscategorize good beans as bad.(9)

So this is our leftist: Curious, incautious, resists negativity, embraces the new and the ambiguous, even to his detriment? One begins to see a certain logic in his attraction to Multiculturalism.

Be that as it may, couldn't these differences just as well come from nurture as nature? Isn't all of this highly malleable?

3) Biological
differences

As
it turns out, looking into the body itself, one can see political differences
in our very biology.

It is looking more and more like our affection for the outsider (or lack thereof) may have deep genetic roots.

* * *

After dissecting the
leftist mind, Hibbing et al. try to explain these creatures to the conservative:

All
this makes liberals far more trusting than they have any right to be, but it is
important to realize that this is not because they are foolish or lazy but
rather because they are structured in such a way that prevents them from
appreciating the obvious dangers swirling about. …. Their first instinct is
to assume individuals in faraway lands are trustworthy.

They
love experiences that might take them off the beaten track. They seem not to
look before they leap. ... They don’t seem to consider, let alone mind, the
fact that this openness raises the possibility that they could be taken in
by evildoers. (9)

The authors also point to a
likely genetic origin:

Our
best guess is that in the rough and tumble of the Pleistocene, individuals
who tried new things, opened themselves up to members of other tribes, and
had little to no negativity bias were rare—it simply seems a losing
long-term strategy in the face of all the dangers swirling about.

…
Selection pressures in such environments would likely favor individuals with
higher degrees of negativity bias, who approached novel situations with
caution, who were loyal to their group, and who were suspicious of the tribe
over the hill.

Our ultra-safe, coddled
modern life has thus allowed that once-rare beast, the liberal, to be fruitful
and multiply? Perhaps. (SeeJayMan on this.) They warn:

Liberalism may thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli
becoming less prevalent and less deadly. If the environment shifted back to the
threat-filled atmosphere of the Pleistocene, positive selection for
conservative orientations would reappear and, with sufficient time, become as
prevalent as it was then. (9)

The question 'Why are
leftists so prone to Multicult fundamentalism?', then, may have many answers. But we at TWCS feel the genetic aspect absolutely cannot be ignored. We would do well to keep this
in mind at our moment of highest frustration:

Are we in fact trying to argue someone out of a belief which is simply a product
of his own hard-wiring?

Religions wax and wane in strength. Ideologies, like fashions, come and go. Whatever its origin may be, let us hope that this particularly pernicious anti-racist faith loosens its grip on us before the body count grows any higher.

Nice to see you here as always! There's a lot of good stuff in there, hope you find something of interest.

Anon--

After running months late (I've moved house twice in 6 months!), I ended up by pure coincidence posting this just hours before the latest attack. Though I do live in the south, I'm not in or near Nice, thank God. Thanks for your kind concern though.

On the whole, the presence of greater wealth & longer life span in more progressive countries seems quite a positive thing. For example, your country France has a life expectancy of 82.57 years while Russia has a life expectancy of 70.46 years. As far as deaths from Terrorism, Russia has had in recent years 21 (2015), 67 (2014), 148 (2013), 161 (2012), 160 (2011), 231 (2010), 141 (2009), & 95 (2008). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Russia I would also add that the higher social trust is needed in creating the greater wealth & makes life more pleasant. A story I once read about an American who booked a hotel room in Moscow & when he got there the hotel owner had given it away to someone who offered more than the American reserved the room for. When the shocked American complained, the Russian hotel owner said "so sue me, this is capitalism" & perhaps in a low trust society it is, but low trust also gets at why capitalism failed to produce western-like prosperity in Russia.

Since the average life span in France is 12 years longer than Russia, plus France is much richer & freer, if those were my options I would choose France, even with the downsides described here.

I also think a post like this should include something about how Martin Luther King Jr was able to win arguments to move the Overton Window toward equal rights for his group. Interestingly enough, many of his economic policy preferences have lost ground in the USA even as his cultural policy preferences have continued to gain ground in recent decades. The fact that MLK worked for eliminating the national origins rule in US immigration policy is a notable bit of out-group work that may bode as poorly for his group as US whites & I think shouldn't be ignored.

Another thing that I think the post should have considered is polygamy. In polygamous societies, every man with say 4 wives means up to 3 other men who would be in a long term relationship in a monogamous society, but are not. This places significant pressures on men.

Finally, it is worth noting how much better things are getting worldwide. The percentage of humanity living in absolute poverty has fallen from somewhere around 43% of humanity in 1990 to somewhere between 10% & 15% today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty There is also the fantastic growth in life expectancy globally https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy/ not just in the west. The global average has gone from 64 in 1990 to 70 by 2011 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/global-life-expectancy-span-world_n_3281211.html to 71.4 in 2015.

On the whole, the presence of greater wealth & longer life span in more progressive countries seems quite a positive thing.

No argument there! But is that longer life span really an advantage if you have to spend the final years of it locked in your home because your open-minded descendents decided to filled your neighborhood with hostile immigrants?

I also think a post like this should include something about how Martin Luther King Jr was able to win arguments to move the Overton Window toward equal rights for his group.

No disrespect to King, who was an energetic activist, but I suspect the organizational strength behind 'black' movements in the U.S. has generally not come from Blacks.

Another thing that I think the post should have considered is polygamy. [...] This places significant pressures on men.

No doubt it does, but I'm not sure to see the connection with levels of out-group trust, which is the subject of this post.

Finally, it is worth noting how much better things are getting worldwide.

If poverty is going down and life expectancy going up, it will be interesting to see if this starts to have an effect on out-group feeling in other societies. Japan as always is the puzzling counter-example, with great wealth, health, and very high societal trust, but a near-total closure to outside immigration.

Great post as usual. The eye gaze thing is interesting. For my Swedish relatives, "what do other people think" is pretty much the only thing that matters. In fact for most people, "what do other people think" is probably how they make most decisions (but it's not listed as a cognitive bias, even though it's probably the biggest one). So for many Swedes, for example, their individual commitment to multiculturalism may be weak, but it's a "trip to Abilene" problem, nobody wants to stand out by saying "this is insane" so they get an outcome that nobody individually wanted.

Thanks. As I get older, I realize more and more how much simple conformism pushes us to our 'beliefs'--even those of us who pride ourselves on being free-thinking questioners of authority. The Abilene Paradox is a great example, and it actually makes me think that when the sea change comes, huge numbers of people who've just been mouthing the words will completely abandon Multiculturalism overnight.

eah--

Great to see you here. Yes, that cartoon is truly modern SWPL schizophrenia in a nutshell.

Brilliant, as always. Are you/anyone doing anything to disseminate this wonderful research amongst opinion-formers? This article seems to be a particularly good summary of revolutionary thinking that challenges liberal dogma. One would think that at least some public commentators/academics would take note of such well constructed arguments.

I'm wondering how I could use the 'progressivism is genetic' meme in daily life. At first I thought it could solve the problem I had i.e. that trying to explain outbreeding and manorialism to someone who isn't prepared to spend time reading quite a lot of stuff is impossible. But now I'm wondering, so what? How would a progressive respond? I imagine by saying, so what, who cares about genetics anyway, it's good that people have become like that. So really one is back to the only reason that truly exists for all these wonderful theories and that is to protect and preserve northwest+/-other europeans. And so although it's good to know why northwest europeans developed so differently, in practice the only argument that will have affect is simply to stand ground and say 'for no other reason than because I want to protect my group like everyone else protects their group'.

Many have noted that Latins and especially Slavs appear less outgroup-welcoming than Anglo-Germanics.

Along those lines I've been wondering what the effects of Brexit will be on the EU and Europe in general. The EU is about to get a lot less Nordic, Germanic and Protestant, so will the largely Latin-Slavic and Catholic EU-27 take a harder line on immigration?

There's a lot of speculation that the UK will rejoin the EFTA, a group they helped form in 1960 but left to join the then EEC in '73. The EFTA is a shadow of its former self; only Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein (pop. 13.5 million) remain.

All those nations are Germanic and, except for tiny Liechtenstein, all Protestant. And rich, very rich. If the UK rejoins the EFTA the EU will be facing a serious competitor: An EFTA of 80 million, much wealthier on a per capita basis than the remaining EU-27 (pop. 440 million).

So what will the EU do? My guess is that with Britain out of the way France and Germany will push for a full fiscal union of the 19 members of the eurozone. They will put immense pressure on the 6 E. Euro EU members that still use their own currencies to finally join the eurozone, which they are legally obligated to do.

The E. Euros can try to resist this pressure but I don't believe any of them are in a position to pull Brexits of their own. They're too reliant on EU subsidies and they all have a legitimate geopolitical fear of Russia. No one wants to be the next Ukraine.

And Poland has Great Power aspirations within the EU. With Britain gone Poland will be one of the Big 5 EU nations, along with Germany, France, Italy and Spain. But if they don't join the eurozone they will be relegated to EU's kid's table, outside of the core group where all the key decisions will be made.

So I'd expect Poland to crack first and join the eurozone, followed by the remaining 5 recalcitrant E. Euro nations. That would leave Denmark and Sweden as the only EU countries still using their own currencies. Denmark, like the UK, has an opt-out, so they don't have to join. Sweden has a de facto opt-out, so neither do they.

But if they don't join the eurozone they too will be relegated to second-class status within the EU. And they don't want to join. Unlike the E. Euros the Swedes and Danes are net payers into the EU. So if it comes down to a choice betweenjoining the eurozone, remaining in the EU with second-class status, or joining their Anglo-Germanic cousins in a revitalized EFTA, I think the choice is pretty obvious.

So imagine 10 years down the road you've got a mainly Latin-Slavic EU-25 (pop. 425 million) all using the euro as their currency, facing off against an British-Scandinavian-Swiss EFTA-7 (including Denmark and Sweden, pop. 95 million). This would be Brussels ultimate nightmare: a Europe divided on ethnic, linguistic, religious and economic lines.

And the nightmare wouldn't necessarily end there. Wealthy NW Euro nations like Ireland, Finland and Austria (the latter two are former members of the EFTA) might tire of subsidizing the S. and E. Euros, and leave the EU for the EFTA. The you'd have a shrinking EU-22 (pop. 405 million) versus a growing EFTA-10 (pop. 115 million).

OK, I'm getting way ahead of myself here, but I think this is a realistic scenario that might actually happen. The full geopolitical effects of Brexit will redound for decades. The EU might not survive it or it might consolidate into a mainly Latin-Slavic bloc alongside a competing Anglo-Nordic-Alpine bloc.

My hope is that as the Latins and Slavs of the EU shed those pesky Germanic do-gooders they will finally get serious about stopping the Third World immigration invasion of Europe completely and permanently. And that they will put maximum pressure on the NW Euro EFTA nations to do the same.

I habituate to see leftists specially those who are cognitively clever AND real believers such as intermediary creatures, between the common and evolutionary advantageous hypocrisy that impregnates in conservative places and the try to think out of group-bias

and they failled

their weaked instinct push them back to the group-think instead make them win the waves of conformity & comfort & simplest explanations

in the same way conservatives tend to be avid to think in white black thinking

most of leftists/liberals finish to do the same, the same white black thinking but in opposite mirror side

other explanations is very simple

in the same there are dualistic spectrum in almost all things in the existence

the same happen with human behavior

other explanation, complementary ones

leftists are very adapted to the stable environment

paradoxically they are more RECREATIVELY impulsives/novel seeking

they appreciate complexity when the natural environment is easy and non-complex

but

in the real novel, unstable and impredictable environments

rightists are better because they are more neurotic, negative bias, trustless.

I agree with you that progressives would be quite happy to read this post, thrilled in fact to hear that out-group empathy is taking over both genetically and culturally.

I also agree that 'If African Pygmies should preserve their ethnic heritage, why shouldn't we?' is about the best argument out there. There's no real way to refute it without sounding like an idiot or a hypocrite.

However, where leftists today are completely on the wrong side of history is on cognitive genetic differences between ethnic groups. As you know, they indulge in full-on magical thinking here--basically that natural selection stops at the neck. What's funny is that hard-wired progressives 100 years ago were all race realists--and I'm convinced they will be again.

The key is the huge gulf between what geneticists know today and what the general public knows about cognitive group differences. What I think's going to happen is that there'll be some Darwin-style eureka moment in a lab, that's going to (re-)prove once and for all that these differences are real. At that point, those of us who've been over here calmly pointing out the elephant in the room are going to be vindicated, and folks are going to want to understand the things we already understand.

I did some wiki-ing on EFTA, and found this little tidbit about their early days:

...the [EFTA's] financial results were excellent, as it stimulated an increase of foreign trade volume among its members from 3.5 to 8.2 billion US dollars between 1959 and 1967. This was rather less than the increase enjoyed by countries inside the EEC.

They make it sound like what really weakened the bloc was the UK defecting from EFTA to the EEC in 1973. Also, at the end of the article:

In the first meeting since the Brexit vote, the EFTA organisation reacted by saying they were open to a UK return. Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann told reporters that its return would strengthen the association.

Sounds like a distinct possibility...

So what will the EU do? My guess is that with Britain out of the way France and Germany will push for a full fiscal union of the 19 members of the eurozone.

I think you mean 'monetary union' and not 'fiscal union' here? A fiscal union is what Brussels has been pushing for ever since the Greece fiasco, but I don't think there's a snowball's chance...19 sovereign states handing over their tax policy, budget decisions, etc. to unelected yahoos in Brussels is a recipe for continent-wide revolution.

So imagine 10 years down the road you've got a mainly Latin-Slavic EU-25 (pop. 425 million) all using the euro as their currency, facing off against an British-Scandinavian-Swiss EFTA-7 (including Denmark and Sweden, pop. 95 million).

I remember during the height of the Greece debacle around 2011, a French economist on TV saying the eurozone itself should be split up into 2 or 3 zones, a Mediterranean euro & a Germanic euro basically.

What you're describing sounds quite plausible, and could in fact end up in just such a configuration-- a southern or southern/eastern monetary union, and then a northern monetary union (with their currency, the 'north-euro'?). Why not? It would make so much more sense, and work so much better, than the current crazy quilt.

My hope is that as the Latins and Slavs of the EU shed those pesky Germanic do-gooders they will finally get serious about stopping the Third World immigration invasion

Yes. While they're weaker on corruption and commonweal in general, they're much stronger on defending against predatory out-groups.

I find your scenario more than plausible and, in my view, very desirable. There is no doubt this Brexit is the beginning of the end of the EU as we know it.

The general acceptance of the feminist definition of private and public life in the Western democracies as the new orthodoxy, in conjunction with the prescriptive thrust of feminism, result in the feminization of politics, the feminization of the economy and the feminization of the culture. Taken together we may thus speak of the ascent of a new sentimental imperialism."

Visionary.

"But this too becomes chicken-and-egg—How many countries adopted communism because it was congenial to their character, versus having it thrust upon them by outsiders?"

No one adopted communism. Not one people.... hold on. One people did (and foisted it on others). Which shall be answered by:

Rosensaft explains it all.

Simply put, like I keep harping, it is much easier to thrive for (((them))) in societies like Hardcore Pawn TV show than in a homogenous, Euro White societies with somewhat high IQ (i.e. maybe not Heiseberg level but not idiots, either).

When you had a country like Poland (or Germany) pre WW2, outsiders stuck out. And worse, things were noticed.

Things like these (give this one a twirl, trust me):

http://rense.com/general92/dirty.htm

That was no good.

Now, in a multicultural society, where the non-chosen fight for scraps at economic bottom (and middle) and the (((top))) controls the money printing (and as we all know, money... rules the world), it is much harder to see a certain ethnic group stay at the top... Whereas it was much easier to spot the more homogenous a country was.

Therefore, multiculturalism ahoy!

It's that simple.

PSOh, also do some research on Jewish revolutionary spirit. Amazingly, the top leadership of every progressive movement in XX and XXI is usually one (((ethnic))) group.

But what do I know, I am just a crazy paranoid dude from the deepest, dankest Eastern Europe region.

PSPS

Some of (((them))) and elites who help them against their own people believe in the plan. After all, WW2, a global catastrophe, for White and Asian races occurred not so long ago - people still remember it (my own family included - my grandma's friend was sent to a slave labor camp and still has the tattoo).

And WW1 was horrific also.

All due to nationalism.

And so many at the top are true believers, proudly stating that: "I am a proud internationalist!". Unironically. Both Jews and their lessers (heh).

The eurozone, though not the EU as a whole, is a monetary union. A fiscal union (the integration of the fiscal policy of the eurozone nations) is what the EU centralizers have been pushing for, and have in fact taken the first steps toward with the European Fiscal Compact, ratified in 2014.

You might be right about a power-grab by Brussels over taxation and spending policies sparking a continent-wide revolution, but I'm not sure if a monetary union can survive in the long run without a fiscal union. I'm not aware of any other monetary union (the US for example) that's not a fiscal union as well, though I could be wrong about that.

Whether a fiscal union is a good thing or not is a separate question, but I think it will probably come about as a result of a grand compromise between Germany and France. The Germans are pushing for it while France is resisting, so the obvious concession that the French will wring out of the Germans is the joint issuance of government bonds throughout the eurozone, aka Eurobonds.

This is the dreaded 'transfer union' that will see German taxpayers' money transferred to southern and eastern Europe (including France) in exchange for Brussels administering the eurozone's finances with Teutonic rectitude. Whether the French people are willing to give up their national sovereignty (and the Germans their tax euros) to reach such a deal is an open question.

But I'm a bit leery of predictions that the EU is suddenly is on the verge of total dissolution. Britain is by far the most euroskeptical country in the EU, they're geographically separated from the European continent, they have a special relationship with the US, they are the head of a Commonwealth of 2 billion people, and they speak the world's lingua franca, yet only 52% of them voted to leave.

So one has to think that the chances of another successful exit referendum elsewhere in Europe are pretty remote in the near term, with two exceptions. Because Denmark and Sweden have close ethnocultural ties with the EFTA members; because they still use their own currencies; because they are much richer than the EU average and are net payers into the EU; and because of their partial geographic separation from the main body of Europe, I believe they will be the next two out the door.

You mentioned the possible division of the eurozone into separate northern and southern/eastern currency zones. Of course that makes perfect sense, and if the Head Eurocrats In Charge understood HBD and were readers of Those Who Can See then it would surely be implemented. But the EU 'braintrust' (as it were) are utterly contemptuous of national and cultural differences, so I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

The foundation of the EU is 'Franco-German reconciliation', i.e. the forced merger of a Mediterranean-Latin-Catholic society with a Nordic-Germanic-Protestant one. Even the EU's Brussels-Luxembourg-Strasbourg power axis lies along the Latin-Germanic linguistic fault line. It may be an artificial marriage, but it's lasted for nearly 60 years and neither partner wants a divorce (yet).

My contention is that Brexit will lead to the emergence of a rival Anglo-Germanic bloc as first Britain, then Denmark and Sweden, and then possibly Ireland, Finland and Austria leave the EU to join the EFTA. Then Germany and the Benelux countries will have to decide if they'd rather remain in a Latin-Slavic dominated EU, or join their Northwest European cousins in a revitalized EFTA.

My guess is that they will remain, even against their own economic interests. Without Germany and Benelux, the EU will simply fall apart. And the Germans' inherent pathological altruism combined with their perpetual Nazi guilt complex will ensure that they'll continue to value the interests of others above their own.

That Hibbing book, Predisposed, really opened my eyes to a lot of things. The biggest being that if a lot of this is just simply hard-wired, trying to argue others out of their political positions may be totally fruitless. It's kind of frustrating but liberating at the same time.

)))sabedor(((--

rightists are, as i read in neuropolitics, the people of the border, leftists are the people of the polis, ;)

Agree--I think another way to say this is that the closer we stay to nature, the more conservative we are, and the further we retreat into our artificial gadget-filled urban jungles, the more leftist/feminized we become.

Things like these (give this one a twirl, trust me): http://rense.com/general92/dirty.htm

Very interesting piece. Those statistics on pre-war Jewish over-representation in finance, media, etc. are just as striking every time I see them. Really amazing.

...it is much harder to see a certain ethnic group stay at the top... Whereas it was much easier to spot the more homogenous a country was.

Yes, this seems to be in a nutshell the root of their intense multicult activism in the last few generations.

And so many at the top are true believers, proudly stating that: "I am a proud internationalist!".

I think this is part of why Trump ruffles their feathers so intensely. He's the first candidate I can ever remember who's come out and stated 'Nationalism not globalism!' Could there be a clearer refutation of the modern Jewish diaspora ethos? I suspect the unprecedented and frankly hysterical media attacks against Trump these last few weeks stem from this. It is fascinating to watch.

Thank you as always for stopping by to say howdy in this neck of the woods.

Whether a fiscal union is a good thing or not is a separate question, but I think it will probably come about as a result of a grand compromise between Germany and France.

After the Brexit vote, I thought the Brusselscrats would ease up on the fiscal union stuff, trying to tread lightly so as to not set off any other referendums... But no, it appears they've doubled down.

This is the dreaded 'transfer union' that will see German taxpayers' money transferred to southern and eastern Europe (including France)

One could argue that is de facto the case already, as the PIIGS bailouts were and are largely due to German largesse... I was naive enough to think the eurozone was going to break up in 2011/12, but I grossly underestimated the German people's desire to ball-and-chain themselves to this bottomless money sink.

Whether the French people are willing to give up their national sovereignty (and the Germans their tax euros) to reach such a deal is an open question.

Anti-EU sentiment is running very high in France. All over Europe you see people wanting less EU, not more. The idea that 19 nation-states could let their income tax levels, business tax levels, budgets, or even minimum wage (yes that's been suggested) be decided hundreds of miles away is, I think, at this point simply a pipe-dream on the part of Brussels / Frankfurt.

But I'm a bit leery of predictions that the EU is suddenly is on the verge of total dissolution.

As am I. It seems a slow, gradual change like your EU / EFTA scenario is much more likely. But there's no way it stays in its current form more than another year or two. Things are moving too fast.

Denmark and Sweden ... I believe they will be the next two out the door.

Solid argument, and I'm going to hang onto this prediction, very curious to see if it comes true. (Are there betting markets on this? Way to make some money...;) )

It may be an artificial marriage, but it's lasted for nearly 60 years and neither partner wants a divorce (yet).

Indeed, and I don't mean to be a total naysayer; nation-states such as France, Italy, or Germany were once seen by many as groups of disparate regions with no core identity which couldn't possibly hold together. The notion of a Franco-Germanic reconciliation-cum-union isn't so crazy on its face in the big picture.

Then Germany and the Benelux countries will have to decide if they'd rather remain in a Latin-Slavic dominated EU, ... My guess is that they will remain

I'm not so sure here. Belgium is already deeply fractured along its Latin-Germanic fault line, not so very far from breaking up a few years back. I think the Flemish majority could easily vote to join up with their Anglo-Germanic EFTA brethren. As for the Netherlands, again, I could see it going both ways--Ultra-Euro-skeptic Geert Wilders is regularly voted politician of the year there. I see it as a toss-up.

And the Germans' inherent pathological altruism combined with their perpetual Nazi guilt complex will ensure that they'll continue to value the interests of others above their own.

Here I see it the other way. My sense about the Germans is they are deeply conformist and rule-obeying, like a herd of cows, but when the cowherd changes direction, they all end up getting on board. I'm not saying Hitler II is coming, but if the AfD can spit out a strong, convincing leader who manages a real Overton Window shift, there could be a sudden veer in a new direction.

In any case I love your prognosticating and I'll be very curious to see how much of it comes true.

I'd add an observation: one of the things which in the past has made liberal outgroup empathy work is that liberals have not had to bear the consequences of their actions. European and North American white liberals could support the anti-French FLN insurgents in Algeria in the 1950s, and the black ANC against the White government of apartheid-era South Africa. When the FLN came to power and expelled the French settlers in 1962+, or the ANC today dispossesses whites, it is not John/Jane Q. Liberal who loses their farm, their home or their lives. Effectively, liberals can toss other White people to the wolves in order to status signal about their own empathic superiority.

Until now.

Now we are seeing the mass migration of the third world into the first. And with this invasion comes "youths" rioting in great European cities, terrorizing people from Brussels to Nice, and generally running amok in Malmo, London and Calais. The warrior peoples who once might have held back the barbarian hordes, so to speak, are long since gone. The French paras and colons from Algeria, the Boer commandos, even a Qaddafi who, in his final years, apparently was trying to stop the African march north -- they are no longer there to man the frontiers.

There's a certain schadenfreude here, one can suppose. How many Europeans who have seen their cars burned or themselves brutalized in recent years by Muslims and Africans, had supported sanctions against apartheid era South Africa, sang hymns to third world "liberation" movements, or perhaps looked down their noses at Southern White Americans because of segregation.

We might ask those Europeans, "how is that 'equality' and 'liberation' working out for you?" Just as we might ask liberal Milwaukeeans who were assaulted by blacks in the recent riots "how are those 'civil rights' holding up for you?"

If this pattern continues, in another generation or two, liberals will be outbred and outfought by the third worlders. And that will be the end of liberals and liberalism.

The dilemma, of course, is that liberals are dragging down the rest of us with them.

Historically, a people who have given up the will to fight for its existence will be conquered, assimilated and/or destroyed by other, more militant peoples. Liberal empathy worked for a couple of generations because that was how long it took for the third world populaces to break through the defenses and reach the White homelands. Liberals could play their mind games with no consequences to themselves.

But now that the third world has swept in from Malmo to Milwaukee, the liberals have to do their own fighting. But they can not fight, at least no effectively, against designated victim groups. The best they can do is concede public spaces and continue in their delusion that with sufficient "programs" and "education" the third worlders will start acting civilized. Like liberals. The result is seen in atrocities such as Rotherham. Even when their own children are being sexually enslaved, liberals will not rise up to resist.

What liberals miss is that part of being civilized is the willingness to use force, often quite ruthlessly, against the barbarians beyond the frontiers. And you need to do so before they show up at the gates of your cities. Liberalism has failed and failed miserably. And again, the dilemma is that liberals are dragging down the rest of us with them.

That was a pretty interesting read. I hadn't realized the general more likely to be trust outsiders among that selection of humanity, but it makes quite a bit of sense after thinking for a bit. After all, those groups are most of the ones who implemented so many of those equal rights ideas in the first place.